Notes from TechCrunch Disrupt London 2015

Day One

Sevenhugs remote

EU startup. Easy control of Phillips hue lights. Maps the person with the remote into a 3D space. Could potentially be used for indoor navigation?
Point the device at any smart bulb or device and instantly control it.
Quite expensive. €200 to produce the remote.

Mainframe

Context sensitive instant messaging with backwards compatibility to email. AI that goes through your email/messages looking for actions. Based on content and context, it converts them to tasks/calendar events/reminders. Pretty cool. Also does same thing for incoming email messages, which means that incoming email acts as an instant message. When sending instant message, if recipient is an email, it creates action links which allows the recipient to integrate with the system.

Max

SA startup. Delivery provider in Lagos. Allows delivery in 3 hours. Drivers drive motorbikes to escape traffic. Customer website allows booking of deliveries with ease. Have launched APIs and are helping retailers integrate their platform with them. The delivery guys are also being trained to be sales agents. They pitch their product, increase awareness.

YayPay

Accounts receivable office for every small business. Setup invoice on YayPay. Client gets the invoice and can pay using various pay,net methods. Also allows clients to pay a deposit. Allows sending up a collection process, like sending an email two weeks before due date, SMS reminders two days before, call after a week after due date and then emails every two weeks. Uses machine learning to determine best payment method.

FairFleet

Munich, Germany. Inspect your construction site using drones. Crowd sourcing model. Choose the construction site you want to get inspected. Mark area of inspection. Set accuracy. Get accurate photos daily. Go back in timeline to inspect progress. Uses MapBox API for geo mapping.

JukeDeck (winner of the startup battlefield)

Artificially intelligent music player. Have build software that composes original music note by note. Google and the royal family have used their music. Choose the length, mood, style and it creates music from scratch. Most awesome demo with live rap.

Move bubble

Yoobic

Apps for helping sales employees work better with sales management team. App allows publishing of goals and missions that can be delivered wirelessly to various stores. Sales employees of their stores will get notified of available mission. App can also be used for inventory management (sort of). Analytics for viewing various metrics like sales percentages for various products etc. Claims can increase sales by 25%. Collaboration platform for brands and retailers.

Caruma

A device with two cameras, front and back, 4G, and wifi hotspot. Provides security to prevent theft. Uses motion and face detection to check if something is wrong. Sounds alarm even if the driver is dozing off. Live video recording and upload capabilities. Comes with the app that notifies when something’s wrong with the car.

Day two

Fireside chat with CEO of Twilio

Jeff Lawson. Used to work at Amazon web services. Observed that communications is key when building a customer centric business. In those times, comms costed a lot and required a lot of hardware infrastructure. Set out to create Twilio to make software driven communications that can be setup in matter of minutes. Strongly believes that the ability to experiment stuff very quickly is key to innovation and hence has built a business that allows developers to do exactly that.

Chat with Hassle.com

Alex Depledge. Website to get house cleaners on demand. It is important to be naive when moving into a new industry. She was able to make such an impact in cleaning industry because she was naive. Lost a lot of money, down to £100 but kept pushing. She and her team coded all Christmas and launched the product in January and made more money in that month than all in last six months combined. Strongly believes in free market which allows movement of labour. Talks about gender equality. Started “Girls can code” movement and found that there are women in tech but they are just aren’t recognised. Also, at the younger age, there is a serious lack of awareness about technology. For instance, girls didn’t know what a UX developer was or what a full stack developer did in their day job.
Thinks that government legislation needs to be refactored. The laws that govern today’s business have been created in old times, situation that is probably not relevant anymore. Worse thing than refactoring code is writing more and more code on top of old code.